As of January 1st 2015 the EU introduces new VAT rules for people selling digital services to EU customers. Previously if you were registered for VAT then you charged all EU customers the rate of your country. Now the rate is determined by where the customer lives.

I won’t go into all the details of the new directives, you can read more about them here, and their impact on small business here. However, we are pleased to announce we have added support for this in Sellwire.

We have previously supported tax registered companies in the EU, including reverse charge EC sales to EU Businesses. Now when an EU customer goes to purchase a product, without a valid VAT number, they will be asked to confirm their billing address. We will match the billing country to the country of the IP address and if they don’t match ask the customer to declare they based in the country they provided. HMRC have made this not very clear, but based on other the implementation in other systems and advice from our accountants this seems the most acceptable approach for handling country discrepancies.

There will be a new Tax VAT MOSS report under the ‘Report’ menu that will allow you to view and export the EU purchases (excluding those from customer in your tax registered country) for any given period, or all time. This will allow you to submit your VAT MOSS return and stored your customer VAT data in order to be compliant with the new directive. We will be looking at improving the CSV export to match the VAT MOSS return format to make it even easier for submission when HMRC release the format.

If you are a tax registered company selling goods in a currency different to the one you will submit the tax return for, we now handle the conversions of PayPal transactions for the correct amounts to appear on the VAT reports. So for example, you are tax registered in the United Kingdom, but you sell goods in USD. The VAT MOSS report and EC Sales list will now show the converted GBP amount. If for any reason the conversion fails (because you know, PayPal) then we will alert you to this in the report screen so you can manually edit the order to add the conversion details.

If you have any suggestions, issues or we have missed anything please don’t hesitate to get in touch via Twitter or here.

First of all we have to say a big thank you to you all for your patience and understanding as we have dealt with our server issues over the last couple of days. On Tuesday last week (5th Nov 2013) our server were compromised, apparently by spammers in South America. They most likely got in due to some outdated software on our servers. Thankfully it doesn’t appear that any data was compromised so all of your passwords and personal information are still secure. We don’t store any financial data on our servers (all of our billing is handled by Spreedly) so any financial data is also completely safe.

Once we realised that our servers had been compromised we immediately started a migration of all of our (Dev7studios) sites to new servers. This took much longer than anticipated due to quite a large amount of data, which is the main reason for the length of the downtime. Thankfully however this won’t be an issue in the future as we have migrated all of our important file data over to Amazon S3. This means that the files you upload to our websites are securely stored and served from Amazon’s own network and not our servers, adding an extra layer of security and speed to our file storage. It also means if our servers are ever compromised in the future, we won’t need to migrate all of these files again.

So as of this morning we are back up and running, and as an added bonus we are now on a much faster setup. Again we appreciate your patience and understanding as we have worked through this issue and we apologise for any inconvenience it may have caused. We ask that you keep an eye out for any bugs or issues that might appear after the migration and let us know if you find anything.

As of today there is a totally new pricing structure available for Sellwire. It was a tough decision, but we’ve decided to drop the credits system completely and go for a more traditional tiered system.

Why the change? Well there were several reasons which have become obvious over recent months as to why the credits system wasn’t working. First the credits system was very limiting, and expensive, for high volume customers. It meant that Sellwire just wasn’t financially viable if you have a high sales volume. Secondly the credits system was unpredictable, in the sense that it was hard to judge the cost of using Sellwire. If you have a sudden spike in sales all of sudden the cost of using Sellwire would shoot up. Not ideal.(more…)